A business plan for your boiler service start-up

Who this is for

This service is for licensed technicians and small partnerships opening a boiler or hydronic service company, and for existing HVAC or plumbing shops adding a dedicated boiler line. It suits people who know the trade well and want the business side thought through before they sign a van lease.

It is not for someone looking for a loan broker or a tax structure. We do not give legal, tax or lending advice. Your accountant, lawyer and lender handle those parts, and we make sure the operating story they read is clear and consistent.

What the plan covers

The plan is built around decisions, not decoration. A typical version has these sections:

1. Service area by drive time. A list of towns and neighbourhoods you can reach in under 40 minutes, ranked by how many homes there are likely to heat with boilers. A wide area looks bigger on paper but kills your margin on windshield time.
2. Service menu and price assumptions. Diagnostic call, annual maintenance, repair bands, and install ranges, each with the assumption behind it.
3. Opening parts stock. The parts you carry so that most calls end on the first visit: ignition and flame-sensing parts, circulator pumps, expansion tanks, relief valves, zone valves, low-water cut-offs and common control boards for the brands you will see most. The business plan guide explains how to size it.
4. Hiring order. When the second person joins, and whether that person is a technician, an apprentice or someone answering the phone.
5. First-year marketing budget. What you spend each month, on what, and what you expect it to produce, linked to the first-year marketing plan.
6. Agreement target. How many care-plan customers you need by your first winter, and how you will get them.

A worked example of the revenue section

Suppose you expect to work 46 weeks in year one, and you can realistically run 9 billable calls a week in the heating season (26 weeks) and 4 a week in the off-season (20 weeks). That is 234 + 80 = 314 calls. At an average ticket of $280, service revenue is about $87,900.

If the plan needs $160,000, the remaining $72,100 must come from installs. At $9,500 an install, that is 8 jobs, or one roughly every six weeks. The plan then asks the right questions: do you have the capacity for 8 installs on your own, and where will 8 install leads that close come from? If your close rate on install quotes is 35%, you need about 23 qualified install enquiries. That number becomes a target in the marketing budget.

Timeline

• Week 1. An intake call online or in person, and a list of the numbers we need from you.
• Weeks 1–2. Service-area mapping, a competitor scan of local search results and a draft menu.
• Weeks 2–3. Parts list, hiring order and the marketing budget.
• Week 3–4. A review session and a final version you own.

How we measure whether it worked

A plan is only useful if you can test it. We set four monthly checks: calls run versus plan, average ticket, first-visit completion rate (a direct test of your parts stock) and agreement sign-ups. If two of the four drift more than 20% from plan for two months running, the plan gets revised, not ignored.

Mistakes we see in boiler start-up plans

• A service area drawn as a circle. Bridges, ferries and highways make drive time lopsided. Draw it by minutes.
• Install revenue with no lead source. Installs carry the profit, but they need search visibility and reviews that a new company does not have yet.
• Parts stock copied from a supplier's starter kit. Stock should follow the boilers actually installed near you.
• No agreement target. Without care-plan customers, the spring and summer months are a cash-flow hole.
• Hiring after burnout. Plan the second hire by revenue trigger, not by exhaustion.

Pricing for this work is quoted in writing; see the pricing page for how advisory work and monthly plans differ, or contact us to start.